I've been mirroring my posts but at some point I'll probably change completely.

*~*

So Altoholic was sitting around talking about religion and comedians on vent, reading trade chat. The Altoholic struck up a conversation with a hunter who wound up complaining about the School of Hard Knocks achievement.

Having been a terror in the lowbie levels on my Survival Hunter, I gave them a couple of simple pointers. The conversation that followed made me want to repeatedly slam my head against my desk.

[05/03/2010]

02:45 [Hunter]: i hate that blizz making me for stupid childrens week

02:45 [Hunter]: 2 years i only got [School of Hard Knocks]

02:47 [Altoholic]: It’s not hard

02:48 [Hunter]: sure tried for everyday

02:48 [Hunter]: but i suck at pvping

02:48 [Hunter]: why i dont

02:48 [Altoholic]: Are you survival?

02:48 [Hunter]: yea

02:48 [Altoholic]: Traps. Scatter shot. Wyvern sting.

02:48 [Altoholic]: Scare beast, deterrence, disengage.

02:49 [Altoholic]: Bring a pocket healer. Outgimmick.

02:49 [Hunter]: [Wyvern Sting] only if u pvp lol i surv but ui dont got that

02:49 [Altoholic]: ._. But you have to get it to get the talent beneath it which is a major pve talent.

02:49 [Altoholic]: Noxious stings.

02:50 [Altoholic]: 3% increased damage when you have a sting up.

02:50 [Hunter]: eh not that major,

02:51 [Altoholic]: I don’t remember the details of it exactly, I’m not on my hunter, but I believe it’s considered something one gets for pve.

02:51 [Hunter]: only time i see anyone have that is if they pvp

02:51 [Altoholic]: I put serpent sting on pretty much everything when I’m on my hunter.

02:52 [Hunter]: yea i do too, but i’d lose 4 point somewhere else, and i’d never use wyv

02:54 [Altoholic]: Increases all damage done by you on targets afflicted by your serpent sting by 1/2/3%.

I was flabbergasted at the player’s inability to read. I’d hoped that with the sudden pause that followed they simply realized the error of their ways and were shying away, embarrassed over a Mage telling them how to play their class.

Then the tells continued.

02:58 [Hunter]: yes but would i have to waste a slot to cast wyvern?

02:58 [Altoholic]: Is 3% damage worth more than 1 talent point?

02:58 [Hunter]: its 4 talent point

02:59 [Altoholic]: But 3% damage for 3 of those points.

See see? 3% damage increase. Point delivered?

03:00 [Hunter]: if i dont have to use [Wyvern Sting] and have someone dispell it if they could just to use [Noxious Stings] is kinda stupid

03:00 [Altoholic]: No no no.

03:00 [Altoholic]: Any time you use serpent sting, which is a dot that you should be putting on your targets anyhow, you’ll be doing 3% more damage.

Come on, come on.

03:02 [Hunter]: will have to check it out

03:02 [Altoholic]: Go hit up wowpopular. Usually specs that are most widely used are widely used for a reason.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

So, the other night my 10 man raid downed Dreamwalker for the very first time. We had our Shaman go in and get all the orbs while our Druid and That Priest healed the raid.

Read that again: 10 man, Shaman goes into the dreamworld. Priest and Druid heal the raid. My main is a Holy Paladin. I was not on him for the progression kill, nor was The Tank on his Paladin.

No, Altoholic was on his Mage, you know, the one that hit 80 on the 10th?

It all started when our Druid was moving. That Priest filled in for me, one of our other raiders played his Shaman to fill in for That Priest, and I played my Druid to fill in for our regular druid.

The next week the druid was back and the Shaman was actually enjoying his shaman a lot more than his other toon. I've been planning on setting up a second run and my main doesn't need much, if anything, from ICC10 so I went ahead and played something else.

I went to get on my hunter but we had two Hunters in the raid already so I got on my Mage. To keep consistent, I kept my Mage in raid for this second week.

I found that I was adequate at kiting mobs for Dreamwalker. I used Arcane Barrage a lot, jump kiting, something I learned while doing the Rohk'delar quest on my Hunter. I'm probably a better Mage now than I've been in the past thanks to my alting.

Honestly, I'd rather play my Hunter or my Paladin but I'm a flex player--My paladin is still my main, but I play what's needed. It's not greed that motivates me to run endless heroics and pug raids on every character I have, no, it's quite the opposite. I want to be the best support player I can, and by having one of everything, being geared and being adequate in everything, I am able to provide whatever is needed to make something work.

I'm not as flexible right now as I could be. When other Altoholics in my guild had toons of certain classes hit 80, such as a Resto Shaman, I put my member of that class/spec on the backburner so they wouldn't have someone else trying to take stuff from their pie. Said players aren't part of my social circle anymore so I should most definitely finish gearing out my alts sometime, at least to the point where they need nothing more from loltriumph.

I know many Altoholics have a bunch of toons, but none that are really great in terms of gear.

Are there a quiet minority of other folks out there who are like me among the sea of folks with mass amounts of undergeared toons?

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Gevlon's post here has got me thinking so now it's storytime... about some things I used to do that makes me think I used to be bad and me now having second thoughts about said judgement. Thanks Mr. Goblin.

Long long ago in the age known as "Classic" and in the places of "Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, and Ahn'Qiraj", I raided on a Mage, a Warrior, and a Priest.

My Mage wasn't the best DPS but I had something special about me: I was frequentlythe last man standing. Sometimes I passed on items that others thought were upgrades and people asked me why.

I told them point blank my reason:

Me: It doesn't have any stamina on it.

Raid Leader: Why do you need stamina?

Me: Because a dead Mage does no damage and is useless.

Raid Leader: You don't need stamina, you're a Mage. You shouldn't be getting hit if you don't pull agro.

Me: I like having hit points.

Raid Leader: Well ok, suit yourself.

I actually had stamina enchants in classic because a little extra int felt useless as I already had so much of it.

A little raid discipline (don't pull agro), getting out of the stupid, and the extra health kept me alive much longer than the other Mages who died from incidental AOE before a healer could get them, the stupid, or because they pulled agro.

So in BC, during the very early Karazhan era my Priest wore the Primal Mooncloth set, as did our other Priests. I ran into a problem that the set had no stamina.

Some of the first mobs in Kara were ghost ponies known as "Chargers", and they would charge a random person and deal them some damage before returning to the tank. We would CC them and deal with them last, but sometimes CC broke, or even when the tank grabbed them they'd charge, and if they charged our all Primal Mooncloth clad Priest healing core, angels would suddenly appear.

I jammed stamina in the slots of my crafted Primal Mooncloth gear, which prompted lots of questions from people. But when Chargers charged, I didn't die and I kept on healing the tanks and the raid.

People asked me why I was using stamina gems.

I said I wanted to be able to take a hit.

They said I didn't need to take a hit, that if everyone is doing their job right and everything goes right I shouldn't need to take a hit.

Even through Wrath I wouldn't pick up the starter gear that didn't have Stamina on it and still look upon such pieces with scrutiny and only gem for stamina on my tanky alts.

I've always felt it was a bit of an irrational behavior until now, that I was just simply "bad" in that regard. Looking again, I don't think I was bad, I think I was smart but unable to eloquently explain my thoughts.

What I've always been concerned with is what tanks now call effective health.

From what I understand, effective health is a combination of health and armor which add up to how much damage (physical) you can take without heals before you die. It's constant, not RNG based like avoidance is. Tanks want to be able to take a few swings and not die in situations where things go awry.

For a non-tank, having enough health to survive a tick or two of incidental AOE while a healer is incapacitated or to survive an add from a boss fight taking a two swings (in fights like Thorim, Mimiron, Lady Deathwhisper) may mean the difference between success and a wipe.

Stamina is important for every class, it usually comes on your gear but sometimes our inner min-maxers get tempted gear that skips out on the Stamina, this is especially true for some of the Wrath crafted gear. For someone starting out, a little more stamina may mean the difference between staying up the entire Toravon fight in a VOA pug. For a young healer this may mean the difference between a wipe and success.

Min-maxing is great, but remember that a character who is dead is not doing their job.

If you'd like to comment on this post, please head on over to http://www.altoholicanonymous.com and post on the wordpress version, feel free to update your links, too.

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Look closely at the following screenshot. It features Myself on my Mage, Gear Score: Zero on her alt Priest, and The Tank on his Rogue getting an achievement for clearing the escape from the Lich King in HoR under 6 minutes.

There's a story to tell here about a Tankadin of the naughty sister of faith variety whom, before we even began, complained about GS0's GearScore while still wearing sub-par gear herself.

Our initial conversation went a little something like this:

We zoned into our random - H-HoR and........

01:55:56 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: not with these heals

01:56:04 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: sry folks

01:56:07 [GS0]: Hey.

01:56:09 [GS0]: Stop.

01:56:12 [GS0]: I bet I can do it.

01:56:12 [Altoholic-Ivi]: Oh mang.

01:56:15 [Altoholic-Ivi]: Gearscore lol.

01:56:24 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: damn right

01:56:26 [GS0]: Your gear + my skill = Win.

01:56:29 [Altoholic-Ivi]: You can put gear on a bad.

01:56:32 [Altoholic-Ivi]: You'll still have a bad.

01:56:35 [GS0]: Look up Alp**** of twisting nether. My main. I can do this.

01:56:37 [Altoholic-Ivi]: GS0's healed totc25 in his gear.

01:56:50 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: my main is a priest and I knew when I was able to do this place

01:56:57 [TheTank-Dim]: She only has 46k buffed

01:57:00 [Altoholic-Ivi]: Bring the player not the gear.

01:57:02 [GS0]: I randomed into this - it says I'm good enough.

01:57:08 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: okie dokey

01:57:11 [Altoholic-Ivi]: GS0's main is like...

01:57:13 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: I have faith in you

01:57:16 [Altoholic-Ivi]: GotUR.

01:57:24 [Altoholic-Ivi]: When it was relevant.

We tore through the first part of the encounter like it was a joke. We kept pulling agro off the Failtankadin, the rogue would lose agro right after he finished his ToT over and over again.

During the second part of the encounter adds went wild and caused a wipe, again, the tank wasn't holding very good agro, focusing only on the footmen and not on anything else. At the beginning of the second boss the warlock pulled agro and denied (while the Paladin denied losing agro).

Then we got to the escort phase and wiped... and wiped and wiped. GS0 was getting healing agro, I was getting AOE agro when waiting for the tank to get Agro, TT was getting agro like wild, and Failtankadin was not doing very basic things that tanks do.

You see, long ago in a land far away, in the mystical land of Molten Core there were little doggies called "Corehounds" which breathed fire and did other not-cool things. To prevent the nasty doggies from hurting the raid, tanks were smart and turned the doggies away from the raid.

Failtankadin complained about us not attacking the right target and said that's why we were getting agro. Nevermind GS0 was getting healing agro doing her job and mobs just weren't being picked up before trying to eat her face. Failtankadin wasn't using Holy Wrath, evar, and was failing to turn the abominations away, making it even harder for her to heal.

Yes, we've learned from Gevlon and the guild Undergeared-EU that we can do these instances in blues, but it does require people play intelligently and this Failadin wasn't... at all.

I suggested that Failtankadin binds skull to her Y key like I do so she may easily mark the kill target for everyone and even tried to walk her through it. GS0 suggested Holy Wrath to which they argued but all three of us pointed out that we have Paladins of our own and know what we're talking about. After eating a few more abomination spews I suggested turning them around. Oh boy. GS0 got out the "OMG THINGS ARE HITTING ME!!!11" macro.

02:38:20 [Altoholic-Ivi]: You should turn around the fatties

02:38:25 [PoorPugWarlock-Durotan]: docs first?

02:38:31 [Altoholic-Ivi]: So they don't spew shit on the group.

02:38:34 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: you should stfu

02:39:01 [Altoholic-Ivi]: My main's a healer. Having to heal through extra shit is not fun.

02:40:07 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: you should go back to your main

02:40:15 [Altoholic-Ivi]: I ain't talking to pick on you. I'm making suggestions as a player who's an experienced tank on paladin, dk, warrior, and an experienced healer on all 4 healing classes and all 5 specs.

At this point we're on the last pull of the escort and we get a ton of mobs, several abominations, which don't get turned and spew all over us and wipe the group.

02:40:31 [GS0]: AGGRO ON HEALER!

02:40:57 [GS0]: AGGRO ON HEALER!

02:41:48 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: YOU ALL HAVE AGGRO YOU FUCKING IDIOTS

02:41:54 [GS0]: Lr2Tank

02:41:56 [Altoholic-Ivi]: You... spewed shit on us.

02:42:05 [Altoholic-Ivi]: I asked you to turn the fatties around for a reason.

02:42:08 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: LOOK AT YOUR WEAK ASS DPS

02:42:09 [TheTank-Dim]: i didnt have agro and died

02:42:13 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: YOUR WEAK ASS HEALS

02:42:15 [Altoholic-Ivi]: We can't do more DPS.

02:42:32 [Failtankadin-Stormrage]: i CAN HEAL THIS EATING

02:42:33 [GS0]: Stop being bad, bro.

The Failtankadin blamed the DPS, blamed the heals, blamed everyone but herself... and raged.

At this point we vote-kicked the tank and got a new one. Now it takes three to vote-kick. I did not vote because I was busy typing in response to the nerd rage, meaning the poor Warlock who'd died repeatedly to the Failtankadin's lack of agro voted to kick.

We continued and did decently until our new tank... fell off the cliff in an epic oops causing the most hysterical wipe ever (except the time in Molten Core when the orange cat from a below post thought the ceiling fan would be a great place to sit).

In the end we got serious and not only did we get through the fight just fine but we did it in less than six minutes. We must have some really crappy DPS and some really crappy heals. All it took was the new tank actually picking up the adds and turning the abominations away from the party.

I think the Stormraging Failtankadin was concerned about GearScore because their own gear and experience were sub-par and they wanted to be carried. As an afterthought, I question if the Failtankadin even had Righteous Fury up.

The bottom line was the GearScore Nazi was the problem.

And thus concludes my tale of once again setting sail for win on the failboat of adventure.

One of my guildlings put together an ICC25 just for the sake of killing stuff last week. We, unfortunately, had a gearscore whore who spammed his recount gearscore meter to point out he was in the top 10.

This player spoke up on vent in awe at the number of female voices speaking on vent, saying his previous server didn't have many girls and he was shocked. I monotoned at him, "I'm really a guy, I just have a hormone disorder."

The guy made a lot of noise in vent about how awesome he was and was trying to tell me (who had a greater gearscore than him) how to properly utilize him. He carried on, this resto shaman, explaining the mechanics of a shaman healing. My dear readers, you can see the bar on the lefthand side of this blog. You see that dark blue 80? That's my resto shaman. I informed him that I had a resto shaman and that he should shut up, that he was jumping up and down on my very last nerve.

Of the seven healers, I scored dead last on the meter, with a 77% activity time. My reason? I disconnected for a good minute of combat. The tanks didn't die so we paladins did our jobs. The shaman? He was 5th below people who had inferior gear scores to him.

Why did these players beat him? Skill > Gear.

I publicly denounced gearscore in the raid, I'll share what I think straight up after this mini-story:

Right before TotC came out, a guild on my server got crit by the summer boss and called it quits. In the beginning they were a guild competing on a worldwide scale, top 100 US guild, priding its self in having some of the strongest DPS around.

Recently they came back to the game, back to our server and our faction.

Their guild leader, another holy paladin who's amazingly good, is a friend of mine and last night he came to me and said, "Dude. Fix your gems. Stop being bad. Use this and this instead of what you're doing now." I did so, knowing that he's not someone who's saying anything to be mean spirited.

From there, we got to chattering and ran a daily heroic with our tank retting, me tanking, and the him healing. He's still in 226ish gear with a few crafted and purchased items, he's been away from the game for about 5 months. He asks us, "What is this 'gearscore' thing everyone keeps talking about?"

We explained that it's an addon people use that somehow calculates the quality of people's gear and gives them a numerical score. It has no actual correlation to gameplay skills, especially when people can farm triumph badges so easily.

He'd taken a group of people into TotGC25 for the first time and got Anub to 1%. Some of his raiders in 226 Uld gear outdps people in full 245s. Why is this? Skill.

Why can I heal timed HCoS runs in a mix of modern and Judgement while my tank pushes 4k dps while in a mix of his ret gear and Judgement? Gear's a fallacy.

I've said it over and over and over again: Putting gear on a bad player is like putting lipstick on a pig. No amount of gear will help a player who refuses to learn what buttons to push or move out of the fire. Likewise, a pig will always be a pig even if it's wearing lipstick.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

After several failed attempts to get into a TotC25 run on my Mage I finally managed to get into one. Once I got an invite I sat in the raid for quite a while before it actually happened but I'm an amazingly patient Altoholic and browsed the auction house and sat around reading blogs and doodling and wishing I'd get unlazy enough to dig up the tablet that the feline in the photo in my previous entry ate the cable of so I could repair it and digitally doodle.

A player in raid spoke up, saying someone wasn't well geared enough for the instance and that person was removed. Then, an Unguilded Mage went on to target me and try to get me kicked... well as well as he could while writing like a lobotomized brat pack reject would speak if it had a hole through its tongue.

This is the conversation:

UnguildedMage: neither is ivia no ofence

Altoholic (Ivi): This is my 8th toon.

Altoholic (Ivi): I know the fights and how to avoid the stupid.

Altoholic (Ivi): I can link you the achievement on my main if you have any questions.

Someshaman: dont fail

Somepriest: Mage dps is easymode anyway :p

UnguildedMage: i dont care as long as loot is fair that you are not aloud to roll on everything cause you prolly would like to lol

So we get into the instance and I inspect this mage. He's wearing iLevel 232 gear with a sprinkle of Conquest badge 226 gear. Like me, he was full of welfare epics. Sure, I had four blues, but they were minor pieces.

I did observe a Holy Paladin in mostly blues with no enchants in the raid, which thankfully managed to become a bigger focus of attention than my "undergeared" Mage. I opted to trade Focus Magic with a Mage who was not the douchemage.

So we did the Beasts and I did ok. I got out of the fire and attacked the right thing (I might have done low due to switching to adds instead of staying on the boss, I was one of the only DPS who switched to kill the adds), I used blink to get out of the obnoxious yeti's iceblocks and continued to lay on the deeps, and in the end the bosses died and I didn't.

I decided to roll on loot just to piss off the douchemage. For shits and giggles I rolled on a Trophy of the Crusade... and rolled a 99. I'm sure douchemage was raging that my welfared out ass won it instead of his far more worthy welfared out ass.

We got to Lord J and the fight began. Lord J got his Nether Power buff and I hesitated a moment before starting to spellsteal, giving time for the other Mages to get some too. None of the other Mages were spellstealing, they were too caught up on killing the boss and doing high deeps. With ten stacks of netherpower plus Arcane Power plus Mirror Image my DPS was pretty wild.

Unfortunately our healers were sub-par when it came to healing awareness and they weren't healing people with Incinerate Flesh and the burning folks were exploding and damaging the raid. Lucky for me, I've got some pretty keen situational awareness and understanding of what Incinerate Flesh does and simply made it a point to get far far away from people who got Incinerate Flesh. As a result, while most of the DPS died I was one of the few still standing when the boss died while sustaining ridiculous DPS.

My experience and my knowledge of the fight shined through despite my gear while others with higher gearscore but less knowledge of the fight from multiple perspectives were screwed by their inexperience. Bring the player not the gear.

So I send a tell to Unguilded Mage.

Altoholic (Ivi): So how am I doing?

UnguildedMage: pretty darn good

Open mouth, insert foot. Having earned some peer respect despite my gearscore, we talked about playing Mages and how it's changed since classic. Turns out the Mage is the retired main of a now Prot Paladin. I commented on the derpyness of the master looter who gave a spirit cloak from the first boss to the Paladin in blues.

At about that time the master looter looted Solace of the Fallen to his friend without offering to roll for the item. It was not announced during the raid (before we started) or at invite time that the item was reserved. There were a lot of upset people, especially healers, and the raid fell apart.

Someday I'll finish TotC25 and get the happy patterns.

Tonight we hit ICC10. We had four healers and two hunters show up. For the first time in a long time I had the opprotunity to switch to DPS, but there were already two others of the class my main DPS toon is: Hunter. The result? Thanks to the awesome that is the AA guild, Mr. Suckmage now has several pieces of iLevel251 gear, is hitcapped without me having to gem for hit (and without cloak), and can boggle people's minds by having some ICC achievements while still wearing an iLevel187 blue cloak.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Since the WOW forums got class roles forums, I've been occasionally following threads there. The threads are often rife with complaints and crying about other classes being overpowered and the class of the complainer being underpowered or unviable.

While some players complain because they fear for their raid spots, or they're worried what top guilds use. Some have simply have convinced themselves that the grass is always greener on the other side, this could be partially attributed to a general lack of understanding how other classes work an obsession with the numbers on meters or parses without understanding exactly what someone's looking at.

Healing meters can show someone doing well, but if they aren't doing the right thing at the right time a wipe can still happen and that means that the person, despite their high placement on the precious meters, failed.

This Alotholic has had the luxury of being able to play on and raid on all four healing classes and all five healing specs. This gives me a perspective that others might not have developed due to their sitting in one or two camps instead of looking at a problem from all camps.

These are some examples of what folks are saying about their classes. I'm likely missing some complaints, I may have actually blown them off as being senseless QQ.

Discipline Priests feel that they can't heal as much as Holy Paladins and aren't as viable as Holy Paladins for tank healing.

Holy Paladins are slightly annoyed by having very little, if any, mobile heals. They're also annoyed at not having a real group heal, that our solution is a crappy nerfed glyph.

Resto Druids feel like weak tank healers, they supposedly have limited "oh sh.." buttons, and in situations where there are too many other people with direct healing aoe spells (like a lot of holy priests) they may show as ineffective on meters due to others sniping heals from their hotted targets.

Holy Priests feel their throughput isn't as good as a Resto Druid's. They also claim to have mana problems.

Resto Shamans aren't terribly mobile in comparison to Holy Priests and Resto Druids. They don't have any defensive cooldowns.

There's also the complaint that X world ranking guild doesn't use Y healing class therefore that class is unviable.

I think a lot of this attitude seems to stem from meters and the concept that healing is a competition. This is not true at all. Healing is teamwork. It's not us vs them, it's all of us supplementing and complimenting each others' strengths and weaknesses to be a well oiled machine.

My viewpoint in general regarding healer QQ is: The grass is not always greener on the other side. Every healing class has good tools and a good player can utilize said class to be amazing regardless of perceived or actual pitfalls.

When I'm healing and there's a wipe that I feel is on me, I sit back and evaluate what happened.

It's rare that I can actually blame a wipe on the shortcomings of a class. The only time I could do this while feeling truthful is when I get stuck with my co-healer (or co-healers) dying and I get stuck solo healing a raid on my Paladin. (Example: Solo-healing Mimiron with a group that's learning the fight.)

Sometimes these wipes come from not having enough gear (like taking a druid barely geared enough for TotC10 into ICC10), but I try to manage my regen cooldowns, pop potions, and trust my fellow healers to heal while I'm regenning.

Usually, I can look back on wipes in my state of healing hyperawareness and say, "If only I would have done this, we wouldn't have wiped." I didn't use a cooldown, didn't throw a clutch heal, didn't maneuver, predict, or react fast enough to save the raid. I make a mental note of it and try to do better next time.

Reiterating: I failed not because of class, and probably not because of gear, but because I'm a human and humans are flawed. My failure, my problem is simply one that exists between keyboard and chair. To correct this failure, I simply need more experience, more practice, and more research.

Before you accuse your class of having problems, perhaps you should take a look at yourself. (Which is, incidentally a very catchy song.) Figure out your own weaknesses and get better.

If you think winning at the healing meter matters then you should probably go back to being DPS.

If you're so unhappy playing what you're playing after trying to get better then you should reroll. Just don't be surprised when you find out the grass isn't actually greener on the other side.

If you're just fine and having fun chasing bars, killing bosses and looting epics, I salute you.